In the field of genomic prediction, genotypes of animals or plants are used to predict either phenotypic properties of new crosses or breeding values (EBVs) for detecting superior parents. Since quantitative traits of importance to breeders are mostlyregulated by a large number of loci (QTL), high-density SNP markers are used to genotype individuals. The most frequently applied SNP arrays for cattle consist of 50,000 SNP markers, but even genotypes with 700,000 SNPs are already available (Cole et al., 2012).Some widely used analysis methods rely on a linear mixed model backbone (Meuwissen et al., 2001), which models the SNP marker effects as random effects, drawn from a normal distribution. The estimates for the marker effects are known as BLUP, which are linear functions of the response variates. It has been shown that when no major genes contribute to the trait, Bayesian predictions and BLUP result in approximately the same prediction accuracy for the EBVs (Hayes et al., 2009; Legarra et al., 2011; Daetwyler et al., 2013).
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